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COMMUNITY IN THE MODERN SOUTH
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COMMUNITY IN THE MODERN SOUTH
TWO SIGNPOSTS, OPPOSITE DIRECTIONS A NOTE FROM THE EDITOR
tom lee
emma c. carter
MEET THE SPEAKERS
over yonder conference 2020
WHO IS YOUR SOUTH? workshop
THE PAN TREE OF LYNNE STREET lindsey abernathy
THE LIPSTICK QUEEN OF FARMING christine rucker
GOD(B)LESS AMERICA emma c. carter
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
over yonder conference thanks
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february 11–13, 2020 | | 7
My mother took back roads when we visited my Nana and Paw-Paw in Raleigh, following the curving roads of the only state I have ever called home. Sometimes, my mother would pull to the side of the highway to let us stretch our legs and pick cotton off the stems bending too far away from the wood-post fence. The two-lane state roads felt safe to me, and so did the North Carolina countryside where my grandfather grew up. If you’re here, you know the South—the one that’s home. If you’re here, you want to know her better. I encourage you to immerse yourself in the stories that are told here, feeling them in all of their depth. While you’re at it, spend some time in your own stories, too. Welcome to Over Yonder 2020.
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Welcome to Over Yonder 2020! We’re so excited to have you here in Oak City. Below are introductions for each of our speakers, three of whom have expanded upon their topics in this catalogue.
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KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
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Lindsey Abernathy lives in Oxford, Mississippi, where she works in higher education sustainability. As a kid growing up on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, she spent countless hours exploring the coastal forests, bayous and beaches of the Mississippi Sound.
DAY ONE
Andre Benjamin, better known as Andre 3000 of OutKast, will be speaking on the growth of rap and hip hop in the south and the development of the cultural community known as the Dirty South.
DAY TWO
Josina Guess is a freelance writer and worship leader at Jubilee Partners in Comer, Ga., a Christian service community where she lived for six and half years before moving with her family to a nearby 100-year-old homestead.
DAY THREE
SUPPORT SPEAKERS
Asia Romero, of Conway, North Carolina, speaks on her experiences with North Carolina Public Schools.
DAY ONE
DAY ONE
february 11–13, 2020
Tom Lee is a United Methodist from Nashville, Tennessee. He reflects upon the recent drama in the United Methodist Church over the possibility of a split within the denomination over LGBTQ+ issues.
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DAY TWO
Marvin Hobson is an educator in Florida and president of the Zora Neale Hurston Florida Education Foundation. He will be speaking on Zora Neale Hurston’s impact upon southern culture and communities.
DAY TWO
Ny’Azia Swain, of Winton, North Carolina, speaks on the community she has found in her hometown in the eastern half of the state.
DAY THREE
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Through conversation, Christine Rucker, a storyteller and photographer from Yadkin County, North Carolina, tells the story of Samantha Foxx, a bee farmer in Winston-Salem, NC.
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Lindsey Abernathy The house on Lynne Street is a modest one. Fifteen-hundred square feet for a family that, at our peak, included five people, a whole slew of hound dogs, and two cats. Tucked among the pines, mimosas, and tangles of blackberry thorns on Mississippi’s coast, it always seemed to me the house was never particularly interested in calling attention to itself, or in standing out from the wildness around it. My childhood home is sturdy brick, the color of fallen pine needles, trimmed with shutters painted a comforting, golden yellow, that popular shade from the 1980s. For most of my adolescence, Lynne Street was dirt-packed and orange. Mom was always sweeping its dust out the front door. When the city finally paved our street, I imagine the house blushed, uncomfortable with the fuss. It sits on three quarters of an acre in an out-of-the-way area between Ocean Springs and Gautier, once called the Island of Belle Fontaine for the miles of bayous and marshland that border it to the north. The Mississippi Sound is less than a mile south, Graveline Bayou even closer; just up the road. And all around it, trees. As kids, we lived seamlessly between the house and the coastal forests. My sister, brother, cousins, and I could spend whole days in the woods with our dogs, branches slapping us in the face as we raced forward - discovering natural spaces and claiming them as our own. We gave them names. There was the Pine Straw Hideout, just to the left of the house. It was small, carpeted with browning pine needles. Branches above caught and held even more needles, creating a sort of roof. They pricked our bare skin, but it was just the right size for two kids to slip in, undetected. The Pan Tree was on the other side of the house, a water oak so grandiose we
named it in honor of Peter Pan and the Lost Boys. Pan Tree was accessible via a clearing from the main road, or — my preferred method — by charging, hands over eyes, into the woods from Lynne Street, with blind faith I would burst breathless into the clearing a few seconds later. At some point during its long life, Pan Tree had leaned sideways under the weight of a massive branch, which shared the burden with the forest floor. It practically asked us to scramble up it. Two cousins lived a street over, their house reachable by a makeshift path through the woods that reliably provided a face full of spider webs. On one particular day, our cousin summoned us, under absolute secrecy, to Pan Tree, where he announced we would try coffee for the first time. He had acquired a metal coffee camping set. We huddled together, squatting on our haunches as he made a show of brewing a pot. Not realizing coffee requires hot water, we drank the cold, mealy liquid from stainless steel mugs, the grounds catching in our teeth and under our tongues. We unanimously concluded coffee didn’t live up to the hype. Perhaps most exciting was Mr. Tony’s farm. Thrillingly, to us kids, the animals were always escaping. And they weren’t your runof-the-mill farm animals. The back of Mr. Tony’s property bordered Lynne Street, culminating in a big, blue, metal gate directly across from our house. My mother, brother, and I arrived home one day to find a male peacock - tail feathers fanned in turquoise and emerald glory - standing in our dirt driveway. Emus laid eggs in my father’s abandoned fishing boat. More than once, a horse got out. On the most memorable occasion, we huddled in the living room, watching from the window as a mare ran laps around the house. There was more. Down the main street from us was a beach with no name, at least
that we knew of, and a view of the shipyard across the sound. Exciting treasures often drifted onto the beach; the day we found a coconut was particularly thrilling. The beach was lined with homes, and we had located, to our delight, a dangerously shaky treehouse. Mom forbid us to go barefoot out there, where cockleburs hid in the grassy sand and boards with rusty nails regularly washed ashore. There was an abandoned school bus rotting in the woods near my cousin’s house, and a pier stretching out into Graveline Bayou that was good for crabbing. When the city built a volunteer fire station nearby, we added this to our list of areas to keep an eye on. Our diligence paid off; we discovered a waterlogged box of paperback romance novels in the ditch behind the station. I visited it regularly, until the pages were too covered in rain, dirt and rips to read anymore. When my parents finally decided they wanted us back, Dad honked the horn of his blue Ford truck three times. Not two. Not four. We’d come running, hungry for plates of fried Gulf lemonfish.
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Emma C. Carter
god(b)less america
iv. Hell’s real, cries the pastor with his hands full of snakes. Hell’s real, cries the pastor, and we’ve built it right here. Christ stopped in dixie, the pastor cries, but He didn’t actually come in. now, the pastor’s glassy eyes whisper, now we can’t leave. v. we never saw any ghosts, not in the junkyard, not in the woods, no matter how hard we shouted at Jesus to push a few our way. so, maybe we were the wicked ones. maybe we were the hauntin’, all sharp teeth and rot-black ribs. mama says this here, this empty porch swing, this sepia—this is God’s country, but i think they stopped inviting Him a long time ago.
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iii. our old daddies got hearts like crowbars and our sweet mamas got cavities. everybody over forty’s got a box of deer bones and a story about the time they met the Devil himself and survived. they got frayed coats and torn jeans and hands that are calloused like their parents’ hands. they got silver hair and tobacco-caked lungs and mouths that don’t like to sing no more. their sorry hymns bled into the croaking of frogs in the cotton blur of the thick night sky. remember, we wondered who was fixin’ survival.
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ii. remember the wire fence, my neighbor’s swimmin’ pool, how in violet midnights we used to sprint shiverin’ through my yard, reekin’ of chlorine—we ain’t never been Godly perfect. summers we played ball and smeared ourselves through the red dust till we paraded home in victory lookin’ like astronauts fresh from mars. we were all bloody scabs and band-aids, swollen lips and loose teeth, the bruises on our skin shaped like God’s fingers. we spat all over the grimy pavement. we stabbed apples with buck knives. we went huntin’ for ghosts after dark just to brag that we saw ‘em and came back alive.
february 11–13, 2020
i. this town don’t grow on you. she grows inside you, in your soft belly, an old oak with too many roots tangled up in your guts. this town’s got secrets as old as Sin.
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Tom Lee The banner went up during Holy Week on the side of my United Methodist church in Nashville. Color-coded in bright hues, it proclaimed our welcome to persons of all “genders, races, sexual orientations, economic or family status, mental or physical ability.” It was beautiful. Our church has another banner, smaller and etched into an old stone tucked into the church’s cloister garden. It commemorates the founding of the congregation. “West End, M.E. Church South, 1887.” It is from another building, another time. “M.E. Church South” is code echoes across the chasm of time. The Methodist Episcopal Church South was born when America’s largest Protestant denomination split in 1844 over slavery — or, to be more accurate, over whether one could own people and still claim to be Christian. Some Methodists, including some of my forebears, said yes. They divided over a chattel war rather than challenge the powers and principalities of this world. Forty-three years later — undaunted by Appomattox, the 13th Amendment, the repudiation of history, and the staggering cost the South had paid and would yet pay for its intransigence — the separate-butequal M.E. Church South still stood. Into that, my church was born. Schism is not news in the South. All of us live in its shadow, one way or another. For some, schism is welcome news. I think of plantation slaves in Georgia hearing the hoofbeats of Sherman’s approaching army, so vividly depicted in E.L. Doctorow’s The March. For some, schism means tragedy. For others, deliverance. But if we tend to think of schism as a 19th-century thing, we are wrong. Schism is back. We can feel it everywhere, tugging at our national politics, half of us certain one direction leads to tragedy and half of us
equally certain it leads to deliverance. And it is back in the United Methodist Church, my church. The particulars are different — same-gender marriages and the ordination of openly LGBTQ ministers are the questions of our day — but our 19th-century forebears would recognize the broad strokes. I would like to put some distance between me and those days, those struggles, those powers and principalities. But our “M.E. Church South” cornerstone is only about 70 feet from the rainbow banner. They both still stand at my church. They both still stand for something, and for someone. What is it, I wonder? And, more importantly, who is it? As a journalist, then a lawyer, and then a lobbyist for the past 38 years, I am a practitioner of narrative. I am intrigued by the way in which the stories we tell — and the credit we give them — shapes our understanding of who we are and what true. As I have been shaped by this experience, so too has my faith. I have come to believe no idea, sacred or secular, is credible without a story against which to test it. Whether Holy Writ, judicial precedent, or public policymaking, the test is the same. We all need a foundation, a frame of reference. For me, scripture is the principal means against which I test the validity of our own experience, collective tradition, and reason. Its frames, though, can be tricky. As Abraham Lincoln noted in his Second Inaugural, just one month before the Confederate surrender in Virginia: “Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God — and each invokes his aid against the other.” In the South, this is more important and difficult than anywhere else. Because we tend to fuzzy up the lines. Telling stories in the South requires a knowledge of —
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and facility with — the barely perceptible difference between church and society. Flannery O’Connor got it right when she wrote, “While the South is hardly Christcentered, it is most certainly Christhaunted.” Here, the line between the sacred and the profane is awfully thin. When I reached sixth grade, my family lived in Columbus, Mississippi. Across a shallow creek from my backyard was a country Presbyterian church with 60 families and an apprentice minister who a couple years earlier had been flying Army helicopters in Vietnam. The weekend of the Paris Peace Accords, he sang “Let There Be Peace on Earth” at the end of his sermon. He wept as he sang. I was 11. It is the first church service
of which I have a specific memory, and because of it, I think, Calvinism never got its hooks in me — nor, I suspect, him. So, when my parents relocated to Tennessee in 1973, we joined a United Methodist Church. There, grace upon grace, I found a home. In 1973, the word “United” before the word “Methodist” was still new. The Northern-Southern split had ended in 1939, and the Methodist union with the Evangelical United Brethren in 1968 had just created the at-long-last United Methodist Church. In those days, I needed something united. I was attending my fourth school in two years. Out of place in school and neighborhood, our United Methodist Church became at once a source of shelter and challenge. The church’s promise that God’s grace was at work on everyone, even before
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they knew it, appealed to me. So, too, did the church’s insistence on a social gospel, calling us to model that grace to others, at scale. In retrospect, my professional interest in public affairs comes as much from that tradition as any other. Also, and this is not nothing, United Methodism convinced me I could sing. When our church started an early Sunday service and the grumpy adult choir refused two shows a day, a parent in the church said the youth choir could support the early service. That we did not have a youth choir was only a temporal inconvenience. Soon, 60 teenagers were waking at 7 a.m. on Sundays to go to church, because that same presumptuous parent convinced us we were born that way, too. And sing we did. In 1978, performing for a patient and gracious home-church audience, we performed a musical called “Celebrate Life,” a retelling of the ministry of Jesus Christ with 1970s style-music. Imagine St. Matthew set to music by the Hollies. It was like that. The emotional center of the show, “In Remembrance of Me,” mirrored the emotional center of the Gospels, the unlikely event when the Lord of the Universe gathers those who, before morning comes, will betray, deny, and desert him — and serves them anyway. In remembrance of me heal the sick In remembrance of me feed the poor In remembrance of me open the door And let your brother in, let him in. The show closed by throwing it back 250 years or so with a song that took its text from the poetry of a leader of the original
Methodist movement, Charles Wesley: Love’s redeeming work is done. Fought the fight, the battle won. Death in vain forbids Him rise Christ hath opened paradise. Forty years on, in the context of our preschismatic moment in the United Methodist Church, we are considering anew whether “love’s redeeming work” is actually done. My progressive friends in the church claim our battle is about the freedom to marry in United Methodist sanctuaries and to claim God’s call on one’s life, without regard to gender identity or sexual orientation. My conservative friends claim the struggle is over Biblical interpretation — specifically, whether a particular way of reading the Bible holds the keys to the kingdom. The latter claim is not new. I had seen it 30 years before. As a journalist, in April 1990, I traveled to Wichita Falls, Texas, to meet Morris Chapman. Chapman then was the pastor at the First Baptist Church, smooth and persuasive as a game-show host and United States senator rolled into one. He was a rising star in Southern Baptist circles, and I had gone to meet him ahead of the Southern Baptist Convention, at which he would be elected president. It may be difficult for a non-Baptist to imagine, and harder to recall through the mists of time, but many folks in the pews of Southern Baptist churches in the late Reagan era thought their church had gone liberal. Shaken by a world in which the mullahs and ayatollahs had replaced the statist villains of the 20th century, Baptists
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Baptist seminaries. As the online history of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary puts it still: “The majority of Southern Baptists could not in good conscience continue to pay the salaries of professors who undermined students’ confidence in the Bible and its teachings. Southern Baptists therefore undertook a campaign to replace denominational leaders and seminary faculties with those who held to the inerrancy of the Scriptures.” And campaign they did. The Southern Baptist Convention annual meetings in 1985 and ’86 each drew more than 40,000 “messengers,” many of them enduring long rides in sweltering church buses to Dallas and Atlanta under the banner of inerrancy. Part revival, part national political convention, part media circus, and byproducts of one of the greatest get-outthe-vote operations of all time, the mid-’80s meetings launched a ritual purification of the SBC. Stanley and Rogers were elected presidents. By the time I got to my first SBC convention, it was 1990, and though the meeting had returned to Atlanta, the circus had left town. Only 23,000 messengers attended. It was the last time SBC annual meeting attendance would crack 20,000. It wasn’t that folks had lost interest. It was that the work had shifted to unglamorous board rooms in Richmond, Louisville, and Nashville. In these meeting places, home to Baptist agencies and seminaries, newly constituted agency boards comprised of inerrantist directors went through the employee rosters.
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took shelter in big-pulpit, media-savvy preachers with deep, honeyed voices like Charles Stanley of Atlanta and Adrian Rogers of Memphis, who preached the sweet comfort of inerrancy — the assurance that the Bible is historically, scientifically, chronologically, and every other way 100 percent true. If the Bible said 40 days of rain flooded the world and that every beast in creation managed to walk, fly, or swim to the Palestinian desert to get on the ark, that was literal truth. If the Bible said God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh, you could set your watch by it. Talking donkeys, priest-mauling she-bears, a planet only 6,000 years old begun in a garden in which two naked people were corrupted by a snake? Yes, yes, and yes. “The Bible is not multiple choice,” Chapman told me then. “It is either all true, or none of it is.” But inerrancy encompasses more than historiography. It means there’s only one way to understand the Bible, as well. Only one way to interpret the mysteries of the vision texts, one way to read the puzzles of Jesus’ parables, one way to fix church doctrine. Never mind the ancient Baptist concept of the priesthood of the believer, the inerrantists proclaimed the application of spirit-inspired interpretation to one’s own context a heresy. Down that road, they believe, lie relativism, uncertainty, doubt, and disaster. And who was spreading what the inerrancy people believed was heresy? Other Baptists, particularly the ones employed by Baptist institutions and
day two | main level, 305 A
WORKSHOP:
Reading and hearing others’ stories is an incredible opportunity to look into the lives of the people around you. Their experiences, thoughts, and reactions contribute to the picture of who they are as a member of their community—and you are no different. Take some time to look through this activity and think about the stories you have that shape you. Where can you see your community’s impact in your character?
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who is your south?
why or why not?
turn to the person next to you.
february 11–13, 2020
if you have, where have you both been? if not, how are your homes similar?
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Christine Rucker In Samantha Foxx’s front yard, there’s a single row of sunflowers still standing tall at the end of October. They seem to stand in defiance of something. They tower over the mailbox and into the road in the working-class neighborhood in WinstonSalem, North Carolina, where Foxx lives and runs Mother’s Finest Urban Farm. You can’t help but notice the sunflowers, still thriving despite the unusual heat that clings to the fall air. They hold an elegance and determination strikingly similar to the woman who planted them. It’s not often I meet someone and feel an immediate kinship, but that happened when I met Samantha Foxx. I would soon find our friendship — and my mind — expand around her world, and the challenges and joys she finds there. Samantha greets me at her front door wearing a church hat, a form-fitting dress and cat-eye glasses, with sparkles. She gives me the tour of her compact farm of vegetables, chickens, honey bees, and a newly planted rows of collards, all on about a quarter-acre plot of land. Although she was born here, she left North Carolina for Chicago at the age of 13 when her uncle adopted her. Foxx studied cosmetology and worked in the hair and makeup artist industry until she was about 30-years old. She returned home to the South seven years ago with a hunger for a slower pace and a vision to work the land while maintaining her personality and style. “I was being adventurous when I wanted to learn about farming, so I worked on a local farm,” she says. “Let’s just say it was a traditional Southern farm. I was somehow talking about lipstick to one of the women at the farm and said, ‘One day we should wear red lipstick to work.’ The lady said ‘Oh no, you could never wear that here,’ and I was pretty discouraged by that. I think you need
to always be true to being an individual. So, I began my own urban farm in the backyard of my home, and now I can wear anything I want.” Samantha has been tending her land and business full-time for the past two years. She has a little bit of everything going on, but the main crops she’s growing this year have strong ties to her history. The collards were planted the day she got back from burying her grandmother, Christine Hunt, in eastern North Carolina. Her grandmother helped raise Samantha before her uncle stepped up to adopt her. Samantha says she can close her eyes and still see her grandmother pulling up collards to cook and put on the table for Thanksgiving. The abundant crop of Scotch bonnet peppers, still popping with color late into the season, remind her of her father, who was from the West Indies. The peppers, along with honey and spices from her farm, are the base for her fire tonic, a classic folk remedy that is rising in use and popularity. She grows the elderberries that go into her elderberry syrup. As more people look to alternatives to pharmaceuticals, the syrup and fire tonic are staples this time of year at the many local farmers markets where she sells - as well as in her own home, to keep her family healthy. Farming is no easy way to make a living, much less for a woman of color. Samantha Foxx talks openly about how racism still affects black farmers in the South, and she never shies away from working to overcome that barrier. When she stepped into her first Beekeepers Association class, she walked into a room filled with white men in their 40s and 50s, some of them wearing jackets with Confederate battle flags. “I was the only black person in the room. They were looking at me like I was an alien,” she says. “I was just so foreign to what they
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summer that 100 years ago, America had more than a million black farmers — and that today, the number is less than 50,000. The story of how they lost their land is part of the broader sweep of systematic discrimination. Winston-Salem sits in the middle of Forsyth County. Out of 908 farms in Forsyth, only 10 are owned and operated by African American people. I live in Yadkin County, about 20 minutes outside Winston-Salem. Yadkin is mostly farming communities, but according to the most recent U.S. Census of Agriculture, we have no black-owned farms. The face of farming, in Yadkin, as in most of America, is, predominately, white and male. None of this discourages Samantha. “I believe representation is important, it’s important not only for black women, but women in general,” she says. “I’m glad I can be that voice (who says) that we can do it, too, and give women the boost to thrive.”
february 11–13, 2020
were used to in that space. At first I wanted to leave, but then one of the men invited me to sit next to him, and the pressure starting lifting from me. I felt like something kind of shifted, maybe they were thinking, ‘Well, this is different, but let’s give it a chance.’ It was probably something that needed to happen there. “I wanted to go into beekeeping because it was a challenge, but it was also about representation. Growing up, I never saw a black beekeeper, and because I never saw anyone like me doing it, I couldn’t place myself there doing it either. I wanted to challenge that and put myself out there being a beekeeper, not just by representing African Americans, but also giving my kids an opportunity to see what I didn’t see.” Recent data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture show African Americans make up less than 2 percent of the country’s 3.4 million farmers. The Guardian reported this
Cheers, y’all!
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Over Yonder owes an enormous thanks to the City of Raleigh for their incredible cooperation and support. Conferences like these—that bring the South and its many, many communities together—would not be possible if it were not for gracious hosts like beautiful Raleigh. Additionally to our speakers and coordinators: the programming you all have developed has been incredibly impactful in bringing all sorts of people together. Thank you for the countless hours you poured into this project. Finally, to you—our participants. Without you, there would be no communities to speak of in the first place. Thank you for joining us to listen to and hear one another— you make our home the very beautiful place it is. We hope that you have been able to connect with the folks around you, and that you have been able to grow even greater from it.
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acknowledgements
february 11–13, 2020
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FEB 11–13, 2020